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Friday, April 5, 2013

This month’s Dynamo Developer Challenge has been inspired by our own Daniel Wright—more about that in the moment.

In a nutshell, for the month of April we will be experimenting across the studio with using Pull Requests to develop a new features. We are moving beyond simply using them as a Code Review tool, as we have in a past challenge.

Over the last few months, Daniel has been religiously using Pull Requests to push new features. As I’m a bit of GitHub stalker I love seeing this, as it gives me a chance to provide feedback on commits and putting Code Reviews into practice. However, these Pull Requests were created once the feature was deemed “done.”

After viewing Zach Holman’s slides from a talk titled GitHub: Behind the Feature, Daniel began creating Pull Requests at the start of a new feature. And I’ve been impressed by what I have seen so far! But I don’t want to get a head of myself; I’ll share some observations at the end of this challenge.

So, how does this all work?

Here’s some steps, based on the write-up Daniel did for his current project:

Choose a feature to implement, and create a new Git feature branch for it.

Once you’ve selected your feature to work on, you’d create a new branch for it:
git checkout -b features/your-new-feature

Now do a very small amount of work, just enough that you can commit it. For example, you might create the view-template you’re going to use (e.g. app/views/pages/about.html.haml).

Now commit it!
git add . && git commit -m "Adds about page template"

Push your branch up to GitHub:
git push -u origin HEAD

Finally, visit the project page on GitHub and create the pull request. Since you just pushed the branch, the project’s landing-page should prompt you to create the pull request. Give it a descriptive title, and describe what you’re planning to accomplish with the PR. For a simple integration job, this should be fairly straightforward, but you can be as descriptive as you like.

Submit the pull request!

So, the April challenge has been posted for our Dynamo-Devs, but we encourage you to join us too. Are you up for the challenge? Please share you experiences in the comments along with our team’s.

For a little more background on this development strategy, checkout the slides below: